Nick was silent for a while. “Look,” he said finally. “If it’s that important to you, I’ll help.”
Tess blinked at him. “What about the contract?”
Nick shrugged. “I need to know everything I can about this damn book if I get the contract. And if he really has plagiarized, I need to know.” Nick stopped for a moment, trying to imagine the horror that a real plagiarism suit could turn out to be. Maybe he should be grateful to Tess for discovering this early, while he could handle it. “So here’s the deal. I’ll help you when you need help, and I’ll stay out of your way the rest of the time so you can do this your way. Okay?”
She didn’t say anything, and he stole a look at her. “Tess?”
“It’s more than okay,” she said. “I keep forgetting you can be like this. I get so upset over the press-for-success part of you that I forget about this part.”
“That’s me, a man of many parts,” Nick said.
“Thank you,” Tess said. “Thank you very much.”
“Sure,” Nick said. “Think of it as a goodbye gift.”
They finished the drive deep in their own thoughts, and Nick had almost reconciled himself to never being with her again. It was the only logical plan. In fact, it was so obviously logical, he wasn’t sure why he was trying to find a hole in it.
By the time they were on the third flight of stairs to her apartment, he was convinced he was doing the right thing. Just drop off her stuff and escape. Just walk right on out.
“Listen, I can’t stay…” he began, as they neared the top of the flight to her floor.
“You certainly can’t,” Tess said as she reached the landing. “I’m grateful to you for offering to help, but we’re never going to—”
He bumped into her from behind when she froze at the top of the stairs. Then he peered around her.
Her apartment door had been kicked in.
Seven
“Oh, no,” Tess said, and went to look through the remains of the door.
Nick grabbed her arm to stop her. “Let me go first.”
The neighbor across the hall opened his door, clutching his beer can with one hand and scratching the strip of belly his T-shirt couldn’t stretch to cover with his other. “Your apartment got hit,” he said to Tess with a total lack of interest. “Last night. I called the police. You’re supposed to call ’em.”
“Thank you very much.” Nick pushed past Tess to stand in the doorway. “That’s very helpful.”
Tess said, “Thank you, Stanley,” a little dazedly, and then followed Nick to peer in behind him.
The place had been tossed and trashed. Drawers were upended, furniture overturned, and all the furniture cushions were slashed and bleeding stuffing on the floor.
“Oh, no,” Tess said again, her voice little more than a sigh.
“You have any enemies?” Nick asked.
Tess shook her head. “It’s not personal. This has happened before to other people in the building. It’s not me.”
“It’s happened before and you didn’t tell me?”
“We weren’t speaking,” Tess flared. “And I was handling it. I reported the landlord.”
Nick surveyed the ruined door. “Oh, yeah, you were handling it.” He shook his head. “Well, from now on, I’m handling it.”
“Excuse me, I don’t think so—” Tess began.
“They did the same thing to the apartment one floor down last week,” Stanley volunteered. “Just kids looking for cash.”
“Just kids,” Nick said. “Little rascals.” He turned to Tess. “Pack up anything you want to keep. You’re coming home with me. No arguments.”
Tess set her jaw, prepared to fight. “I thought you couldn’t wait to get rid of me.”
“Well, yes, but I meant out of my life, not out of life in general,” Nick said, ignoring her to peer through the door. “You are not staying here. If you’d rather stay with Gina, fine, but you’re not staying here.”
“Gina has one room, an efficiency,” Tess said. “She couldn’t squeeze Angela in, let alone me.” She stopped suddenly.
“Fine,” Nick said, oblivious to her silence. “Then you’re staying at my place. There’s a guest bedroom. Your virtue is safe.” He turned and saw her face, white with fear. “What’s wrong?”
“Angela,” Tess said, and bit her lip. “I don’t see Angela.”
Nick moved to put his arms around her, and she leaned against him gratefully. “Angela is not a stupid cat,” he said into her hair. “When the Brady Bunch showed up, she probably went out the window.” He tightened his arms around her and then said, “Come on. Let’s get your stuff and go.”
Tess nodded, and Nick moved cautiously ahead of her into the apartment. He checked her bedroom before she could, to make sure Angela wasn’t bleeding into the bedspread. Not only was there no Angela, there was no bedspread. The bedroom was as ransacked as the rest of the apartment. He turned back to Tess. “Pack.”
She opened her mouth to argue, and he overrode her. “Look, you want to find a new place tomorrow, no problem. But you can’t stay here. Not ever again. I’d never sleep again waiting for these guys to come back and do to you what they did to the couch.”
“Okay,” Tess said. “All right.”
Nick watched her rescue what she could from the place, brushing off her mismatched sofa pillows and picking up odds and ends of God knew what. And while he watched, he tried a little deep breathing to calm the fear and rage that were making him insane. If he hadn’t dragged her off to Kentucky, she could have been here, in this dump. Pure luck of the draw. The thought of losing her in any way made him cold, but losing her like this would have been—
“I’m all right,” Tess said, and he looked up to see her standing in the doorway with a laundry basket full of clothes. “I know you’re upset, but I’m all right and I’m leaving with you and I’m not coming back. I promise.”
“Thank you,” Nick said. “Is there anything you want in the kitchen?”
“Yes,” Tess said. “But I don’t suppose it’s in one piece anymore. Did you look in there?”
“It’s not good,” Nick said. “Come on. I’ll help.”
They managed to rescue a few odd pieces of china and glassware.
“Was this stuff your mother’s?” Nick asked, and Tess looked at him oddly.
“Elise doesn’t have stuff,” she said. “This is just stuff I found in thrift stores that I liked.” She gazed at it sadly. “Maybe I liked it because it’s the kind of stuff that mothers are supposed to give to their daughters. That’s pathetic.” She stood up, leaving the china on the floor. “I don’t want it. All I want is Angela.”
“I’ll work on it,” Nick said. “Get your things together, and I’ll take the first load down to the car.”
He took the laundry basket out on the landing and knocked on the door across the hall. The neighbor looked out. “Yeah?”
“You know that big black cat that belongs to Tess?” Nick said.
“Yeah?”
“I’ll give you a hundred bucks if I can pick up that cat tomorrow.”
“How the hell am I supposed to get that cat back?” Stanley whined.
“Well, if I were you, I’d buy about ten cans of cat food and sit over there until the cat comes back,” Nick said.
“That could be hours.”
“That’s what I’m paying for,” Nick said, handing over his business card. “Take it or leave it.”
Tess came to the door carrying her duffel bag and Nick’s suitcase. “This is everything.”
“Great,” Nick said. “Let’s go.”
TESS SAT LOST in thought on the way to Nick’s, grateful for the silence he gave her, trying to figure out why she felt so torn. It wasn’t that she loved her apartment; she hated it. Nothing ever worked right, and the street was noisy, full of shouting and squealing brakes, and even now and then a gunshot. But it had been hers, and now she was going to Nick’s, and she was pretty sure that wherever Nick’s wa
s, there wouldn’t be screams or shots or cockroaches or broken anything. She was pretty sure it would be clean and safe and expensive and tempting as hell.
Then Nick turned off the road into his driveway, and it was worse than she suspected.
The house wasn’t large, but it was beautiful, an architect’s miniature masterpiece of white planes and angles bisected by gleaming glass that reflected the moonlight. She’d been prepared to resist clapboard colonial or petite plantation or even pseudo-cedar Frank Lloyd Wright, but this was such a work of art that only a person blinded by prejudice could find it anything but lovely.
“Do you like it?” Nick asked when he’d cut the engine.
“I’ve never seen anything so beautiful,” Tess said, and she felt him relax next to her. “When you brought me out here before it was finished, I never dreamed it would look like this. Who designed it? You?”
“Not exactly.” Nick eased down in his seat a little, surveying the house. “When I was in law school, a buddy of mine got in trouble. I helped him out, did all the legal legwork and saved his butt. He was a senior in architecture, and he took me out for a beer, and after a few, we started talking about the perfect house, and a month later he gave me the plans for this. So I saved up and bought the land, then I saved some more and built the house. It took me a while.”
Tess watched his face as he looked at his house, seeing the pride and love there.
“The builders were the best,” he said, “and the irony is, my buddy’s a big name now. Preston Delaney. People come by and photograph it because it’s an early, pure Delaney. I’ve only been in it a couple of weeks, and somebody’s already offered me twice what it cost to build it.”
Tess rolled her eyes. “Another investment.”
Nick shook his head. “Nope, it’s more than that. Wait until you see inside. It’s perfect. It was done a month after you left.” His grin faded. “That was one of the biggest disappointments about your dumping me. You never got to see it.” He turned to her in the moonlight. “I know we’re finished with each other, but I’m glad you’re here to see it.”
Tess bit her lip. “Thank you for inviting me to stay. I’ll try not to get it dirty.”
Nick patted her knee and then got out to open the car door for her while she stared at the house with fear and longing.
The interior left her speechless. The ground floor was one big room bisected by black lacquered folding doors with a staircase winding up the middle of it. To her right, through partially opened doors, Tess could see a massive ebony Parsons dining table and black lacquered chairs. To the left, huge overstuffed couches faced each other across thick rya rugs, flanking a cavernous white brick fireplace on one wall and a built-in wide-screen TV on another. The back wall was all glass looking out on an angular pool that reflected the moonlight like marcasite.
Except for the dining-room furniture, every single thing in the place was white. Tess felt very small and very dingy. She moved to one of the couches, touching it and then jerking her hand away.
“What’s the matter?” Nick asked.
“This couch is suede,” Tess said.
“I know.”
“Real suede?” Tess asked, knowing it was a dumb question. If it was Nick’s, it was real.
“Of course it’s real suede.”
“You have white suede couches,” Tess said and closed her eyes. “Do you live here? Does anybody live here?”
“Don’t you like it?”
“It’s incredible. But I am definitely going to get it dirty.”
“That’s why a cleaning woman comes in twice a week,” Nick said.
“Well, that’s a relief.” Tess turned to the stairs. “Bedroom up here?”
“Three,” Nick said. “Take your pick.”
“Which one are you in?”
“The one at the back. Big bed. Black satin spread. The guest room is at the front.”
“Black,” Tess said. “You know, I don’t mean to criticize, but this place could use some color.”
“I like it this way. It looks expensive.” Nick started up the stairs with the duffel and the suitcase. “Where do you want this stuff?”
“Guest room.” Tess said, and followed him with the laundry basket.
TESS LAY AWAKE that night, listening for the screams and the shouts that weren’t there, trying not to worry about Angela and feeling guilty because she was so safe. The other tenants didn’t have rich, depraved conservative lawyers to sweep them off into sinful luxury. And then there was Gina, looking at Park with puppy-dog eyes. And the Foundation kids, now that she’d shot herself in the foot with the Sigler woman. And Lanny. The other problems were more pressing, but Lanny was the one she owed the most. Lanny had been there for her when she was eight; now she was going to be there for him.
She tossed and turned for another hour, shuffling her worries like a deck of cards. When she finally couldn’t stand it any longer, she slipped out of bed and tiptoed down the stairs, careful not to wake Nick, and went out to the pool. She stripped off her T-shirt and underpants, dove into the water and began to swim laps to exorcise her demons.
One lap for the apartment-house tenants and their unlocked doors.
One lap for Gina and her doomed love life and her job search.
One lap for the kids at the Foundation and their imperiled futures.
One lap for Lanny and his trashed vision.
One lap for Nick and his infuriating double personality.
Only one lap didn’t do it. Once she started to think about Nick warm in that damn black bed upstairs, she swam faster, but it didn’t help. All the images of him she’d ever tortured herself with came back—Nick laughing at her at the touch football game that had started it all, Nick’s arms in that rag of a sweatshirt as he teased her about her laundry, Nick beautiful in evening clothes—but now she had new memories, memories of Nick hot and naked, his body moving over hers, and she got dizzy just thinking about it, so dizzy that at the end of the last lap, she clung to the edge of the pool and gasped for breath.
“You okay?” she heard Nick say, and she looked up to see him standing there, in black silk boxers, his hair tousled from his pillow.
He looked wonderful.
Tess groaned and let herself slip under the water.
She felt Nick’s hand grab her arm and drag her ruthlessly to the surface.
“I know you’re depressed, dummy,” Nick said, holding on to her. “But don’t drown yourself in my pool. My insurance rates will go up. Not to mention I’ll never get another date again if it gets out that being with me makes women suicidal.”
“I’m not suicidal,” Tess said, and then realized he was never going to make love to her again. “Well, maybe I am.”
“Actually what you are is naked.” Nick sounded distracted, but he didn’t let go of her arm.
“It’s a private pool.” Tess was too depressed to argue with any enthusiasm. “It’s not illegal.”
“No, but it’s probably immoral,” Nick said. “Whatever it is, I like it. Let’s go back to my bed and discuss it.”
Tess blinked up at him, treading water a little faster. “I thought we were finished.”
“Well, we were until your apartment got trashed and I thought about losing you, and then you ended up naked in my pool,” Nick said. “I remember being sure I never wanted to see you again. I just don’t remember why at the moment.”
Tess sighed. “It was probably something about your career. Everything with you is.”
“What career?”
“Really?” Tess said, her voice suddenly bright with hope.
“I’m thinking about becoming a pool boy,” Nick said. “You meet such naked people.”
Tess jerked the arm he was holding and yanked him into the pool.
“Hey,” he sputtered when he surfaced, but by then she’d wrapped herself around him and found his mouth with hers, and they slipped under the water as she kissed him.
Nick kicked them both to the surface
again and held her tight against him as he tried to get his breath back. Tess trailed kisses down his neck, licking the water from his skin with her tongue, loving the feel of the muscle against her mouth.
“A bed,” Nick gasped. “I have this great bed—”
“Here,” Tess said, and kissed him. She felt him relax into her as he pulled her hips tight against his, and she wrapped her legs around him again, feeling the slick wet silk of his shorts against her thighs. “Those have got to go,” she told him, and began to slide her fingers under the waistband to yank them down.
“Wait a minute,” Nick said, grabbing her hand, still trying to keep them afloat. “About my bed—”
“Here,” Tess said, tugging downward on his shorts.
“The neighbors—” Nick said, tugging upward.
“Here,” Tess said tugging harder.
“I really think my bed—” Nick tried again, prying her fingers from his waistband.
Tess gave a scream of fury and pushed him away. “Forget it,” she said. “Just forget it.”
“Look, is this the romantic thing again?” Nick groped through the water for her again. “Because I don’t see what’s so romantic about a damn pool.”
“It’s not just romantic,” Tess said, kicking backward to get away from him. “It’s spontaneous. It’s sexy. It doesn’t feel like a damn career move!” She was so mad she dove underwater to get away from him, and when she surfaced he was gone.
Well, good. The hell with him. If she’d given in, she’d have ended up having sex in bedrooms for the rest of her life. Which of course, wouldn’t have been an entirely bad thing since it would have been with Nick. It was actually pretty cosmic when she thought about it. But she wasn’t going to think about it because he was the most unspontaneous, conservative, let’s-plan-every-move man she’d ever met. Which did, of course, often lead to great sex since he made sure…
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